What Silicon Valley’s Favorite Word Says About Tech Priorities

Not so long ago, Silicon Valley was filled with magic. For years after Steve Jobs described the original iPhone as a “revolutionary and magical product,” a rash of imitators jacked Jobs’s language to describe their own products. Social-media apps, big-data platforms, 3-D printers—anything pointing vaguely in the direction of the future was likened to an act of earthshaking magic, its inventor to a digital DavidCopperfield.

These days, though, magic is out, and “delight” has taken hold. Sit in any high-end coffee shop in San Francisco and you’ll see start-up founders pitching their delightful wares. “Delight” and “delightful” have become all-purpose marketing words in the tech world, trotted out to describe anything even marginally surprising or well made, in the hopes that even uttering the word will loosen the purse strings of investors and customers. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has called Twitter ads “a delightful experience.” Sheryl Sandberg has vowed to show Facebook users “something … that really delights you.” Apple’s new corporate motto is “Simplify, perfect, delight.” Yahoo’s turnaround plan? You guessed it: “Inspiring and delighting users.” At a recent Google conference, I started a notebook tally of the number of times an executive said “delight,” and tapped out at 20. “It’s delightful,” Google executive Matias Duarte said of an app’s design. Android head Sundar Pichai touted the “simple, delightful experiences” contained in the latest version. “We can help you to create uniquely delightful experiences for your users,” product manager Ellie Powers promised the audience. From the sound of it, you’d think these were executives at Willy Wonka’s factory, not mobile developers in MountainView.

When did the titans of tech start talking like kinder­garten teachers? Squarespace, a New York–based web-hosting company, says it aims to “delight our customers.” So does Vessel, a digital-video start-up, and DigitalOcean, a cloud-based hosting provider. (Because what is cloud computing for, if not to bring joy to the downtrodden?) Go to Portland in October and you’ll find “Delight 2014,” a two-day conference featuring speakers from Google, Facebook, and Uber. Even the old-line economy has gotten in on the action—when Frito-Lay introduced a new line of Cracker Jack in April, its press release promised “new flavors that will continue to delight ourconsumers.”

The heaviest use of “delight” seems to be concentrated within the consumer start-up world, among those who believe that good design can help them stand out from the competition. “The world is pretty bored with being able to accomplish tasks efficiently,” Rishi Mandal, the co-founder of urban-discovery app Sosh, told me. “The next question is, how do you accomplish tasks while creating asmile?”

Silicon Valley isn’t the only jargon culprit in the corporate world, of course. But tech’s semantic tics are more meaningful, because they dictate what kinds of innovations are rewarded and financed. Words like “functional” and “compatible” were important in the early days of Silicon Valley, when engineers were trying to bring order to messy technological infrastructure. But in the post-iPhone world, it’s no longer enough to make something work well; it has to feel good, too. This isn’t just a matter of taste—it’s a political shift. Emphasizing form over function is a way for designers, who typically sit lower on the Silicon Valley totem pole than their engineering counterparts, to remind executives that their opinionsmatter.

“Designers are constantly having to describe and prove our value to the rest of the tech world,” says Jenna Bilotta, a former Google designer and a co-founder of Avocado Software. The overuse of design concepts like “delight” among marketers and non-designer executives, she says, is “the side effect of that broken part of thesystem.”

Buzzwords inevitably stray from their original meaning, and even techies who traffic in delight will admit that the word has gotten diluted. “The Google keynote was like, guys, get a thesaurus,” says Josh Brewer, a former principal of design at Twitter. Jeff Cram, who organizes the Delight conference, agrees to an extent: “The word can feel trendy and overused, and can certainly get an eye-roll. But the movement isreal.”

So what is that movement? The problem with delight is that it’s often applied to small, trifling details: the way an icon moves within an app, say, or the way a menu is triggered on a website. It’s not often applied to huge, ambitious projects—nobody would describe Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets as “delightful,” though they certainly are—nor does it cover inventions whose value is primarily pragmatic. (Air bags were a lifesaving product, but hardly a delightful one.) To describe an innovation as a “delight” is to preempt judgment of its utilitarian value, to ask it to be evaluated on aesthetic grounds rather than by the work it does. Delight can be wonderful, but it can also be dumb. In a pre-delight world, we may never have gotten Google Glass, Facebook’s Slingshot app, or Siri—inventions that are nothing if not triumphs of whimsy overusefulness.

Then there’s the word itself. Unlike tech jargon that sounds futuristic—pivot, disrupt, and scalable would all have made good names for the Jetsons’ robot dog—“delightful” is a throwback, a Victorian adjective taken out of mothballs and repurposed for the digital age. And, as with any buzzword, tin-eared abuse is inevitable. (“Delighting our customers every day with great, simple products and experiences is a priority for me,” wrote PayPal CEO David Marcus in a 2012 companywide memo, paragraphs before announcing that he was laying off about 325 people.) At its core, though, delight was always a designer’s shibboleth, a way to say: We put a lot of thought into this, and how to make itpleasurable.

But delight’s days may be numbered. Many of the designers and entrepreneurs I spoke to told me that there’s a new design principle taking over. That principle? “Frictionlessness,” or the idea that good design is best when it’s hidden. (Think of the way you get out of an Uber car without having to pay, or having your phone’s calendar app adjust your appointments automatically when you switch time zones.) Frictionlessness and delight aren’t mutually exclusive, but they stem from different ideas about what’s important. And indeed, if you look through the tech product announcements and conference speeches, “frictionlessness” (and its cousin, “seamlessness”) is making inroads onto delight’s turf. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used both “seamless” and “friction-free” in a recent memo to employees. Facebook now swears by a principle called “frictionless sharing,” which aims to make it as easy as possible for users to post and engage with the posts of others. Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, has said, “Friction is the biggest product thing we’re workingon.”

The popularity of “frictionless” design may stem from a feeling that too much delight can be distracting. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a well-known delight junkie, having once told Amazon shareholders that a successful product “surprises, delights, and earns trust.” But earlier this year, when Amazon released its first-ever smartphone, it became a cautionary tale. Amazon’s phone, dubbed the Fire, had a “dynamic perspective” feature that made icons appear to pop off the screen, but when it came to nuts and bolts, the phone fell short. Reviewers panned the gadget, and Wired wondered if Amazon had “fallen too deeply in love with the idea of delightfulinteractions.”

For those of us who depend on companies like Amazon and Google to create the products than run our lives, the delight backlash is overdue. Perhaps, with seamless operation becoming Silicon Valley’s metric of choice, the fetishization of design will give way to a renewed emphasis on what works. Now, that would bedelightful.

*This article appears in the August 11, 2014 issue of New YorkMagazine.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, uses an unofficial online messaging service for official White House business, including with foreign contacts, his lawyer told the House Oversight Committee late last year.

The lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he was not aware if Mr. Kushner had communicated classified information on the service, WhatsApp, and said that because he took screenshots of the communications and sent them to his official White House account or the National Security Council, his client was not in violation of federal records laws.

In a letter disclosing the information, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee said that he was investigating possible violations of the Presidential Records Act by members of the Trump administration, including Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. He accused the White House of stonewalling his committee on information it had requested for months.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to stop disparaging the late Sen. John McCain, calling the Vietnam war hero “a dear friend” and defending him against the president’s criticisms. …

Ernst’s remarks came during a town hall meeting at a high school in Adel, Iowa, where several attendees voiced anger about Trump’s attacks about McCain. One attendee described McCain as a “genuine war hero” and called Trump’s comments about McCain “cowardly.”

“I do not appreciate his tweets,” Ernst said, when pressed by the attendee why she didn’t previously speak out more forcefully. “John McCain is a dear friend of mine. So, no I don’t agree with President Trump and he does need to stop.”

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.